The rub on freelancing has been that typically, the juiciest assignments were left for the staff. The role of a contractor was to come in, mop up the garbage no one else wanted to touch, and collect their day rate. No one got hurt. Nice and tidy.
Then along comes Mr. Recession. For the first time in a long time, agencies were cutting bone instead of dead wood, leaving some of the most talented people in the world ripe for the picking.
The level of today’s available freelance talent has game-changing implications. Never in history (and this includes the depression, since advertising hadn’t yet emerged as a career) has so much world-class talent been available for short-term projects. Smart agencies – and even smarter clients – are tapping this incredible resource pool.
The Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday that between January and March of this year, freelance job sites Elance.com and Odesk.com alone posted a combined 70,500 jobs from hiring companies looking for contracted work. That represents increases of 35% and 105% respectively. Similarly, the Economist reports that Freelancer’s Union has seen its membership grow by 2,000 – 3,000 month since October, and now has more than 100,000 members.
Now, it doesn’t take a math major to know that fewer new jobs + more layoffs = a growing freelance pool. But when you compare those numbers with the amount of jobs shed in advertising since the recession began early 2008, you get a sense of one direction our industry might be heading.
If an agency has great talent available to them without having to absorb the expense of hiring them full time, why wouldn’t they milk that for as long as they can? And, as newly independent contractors, why wouldn’t we?
There will come a day when advertising agencies start hiring again. But the question remains, if you were thriving as a freelancer, would you want to go back?
6 Comments
There’s no doubt that crazy talented people can do enormous things for a pitch.
But for the ongoing work, the challenge is “institutional memory”. Getting a fresh crop of brilliant people up to speed on things my on staff people have spent two years learning, takes up a fair amount of my time that could be spent making some other piece of work great.
There’s only so much you can squeeze into a brief, and it’s why CDs loath letting the great people go. It’s not just how good they are; it’s what they know.
All truths, boss. Agencies will always need their “core team.” Talented people who are intimate with their clients’ brands are why there are agencies at all. My only question is whether or not we have seen a permanent shift away from the glory days of that model. I suspect we’re in for some combination of the typical AOR as we know it and more free agency.
From the perspective of a project-based consultancy like my former employer (Razorfish), having salaried talent available across projects is a competitive differentiator- so if they are freelancers you really can’t stop them from working for a competing agency, or on working on a pitch you hope you could win. It might be worth it to guarantee yourself that advantage.
So the good news: recessions are the single best time to be a freelancer. In SF during the dot com bust, it was a freelancer’s dream.
The bad news: with so many freelancers in the pool, rates drop dramatically. I’m making a day rate of about 40% less than I was 2 years ago and any time I stick to my guns on rate, I don’t get the job.
One of the great things about working in a creative, evolving profession is that the good people always adapt. But the process isn’t easy, or painless, or pretty.
Even if I don’t lose my job within a matter of weeks, I’m not sure I want it anymore. Haven’t produced a single thing in over a year, and yet I work every weekend.
My job is dead. I’m just tending to the body. From where I sit, freelance looks like an opportunity to circulate, expand the network, and maybe hook up with the next interesting thing. Sign me up. (Just give me my severance check first.)
1) The business goes up and down.
2) It sucks laying people off.
3) I believe in a staffing model that uses a core team that knows the clients, augmented by smart, fast talented freelancers when needed.
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